


It Rains in Springtime

by rokhal



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: But just temporarily, Butchering, Childbirth, Curtain Fic, Depression, F/M, Frenemies, Gore, Kid Fic, Motherhood, Pining, Precocious Kid, Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:03:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Motherhood is a battle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Rains in Springtime

The night Elizabeth’s son was born, it rained.

It had been raining most of the past week, storming, drenching, thundering; the clouds glowed a sickly green by day, and hovered blind-black by night. In the small hearth of her house—“house,” she called it on a good day, “hut” on a bad—frugal flames smoked and hissed. Pei the girl had fetched the midwife, tended the fire, and set out pots to catch leaks.

The birth had been a fair one for a first child: straining all afternoon, but not too much blood, and only a single scream, shrill to rustle the thatching though it was. Elizabeth stared at the rafters, glassy-eyed, even as the boy’s hot, squirming weight was settled into her arms. 

“Ma’am, look at him,” the midwife whispered, watching her motionless patient with concern. 

Elizabeth merely shivered and licked her bitten lips.

The midwife, frowning, laid a hand on her shoulder, her throat, her forehead. “Have you thought of a name?” she prompted her, and then Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut, nodded her head, and looked down at the wrinkled pink creature in her arms that was nuzzling around the crook of her elbow. With another shiver, she clutched the boy close, folding over him, feeling his unsteady prods and wriggles against her pounding chest.

The midwife frowned again and gently loosened Elizabeth’s grip, with a warning glance for Pei. Pei nodded, impassive as usual.

“Well, go on then,” the midwife said. “Tell it.”

Elizabeth’s lips worked, struggling, unsteady, running half-forgotten syllables over her tongue. She shook her head vaguely; her thoughts were fogged and faltering.

“There, dear. It’s just a name. You’ve still time afore the christening.”

“William.” The name was a choked sob. “Just call him William.”

The midwife nodded, and eased Elizabeth’s shirt aside so William could nurse. His mother lay back, barely holding him, shuddering on the sweat-soaked blankets.

The rain had fallen steadily through the night and the following morning, when Elizabeth dragged herself up, checked to see that Pei was still sleeping, curled like a dog on her cot, and covered her son against the draft. The sky was again that hostile gray-green, and the raindrops thick and fat as locusts. She slipped out of the little house and up the stony path to the cliffs overlooking the sea, and slumped at the edge as the water poured down, her hair fell heavy over her face, and her bare feet burned against the rock until at last the cold numbed them into silence.

Rocks cracked the rollers into tossing foam below. As she stared down, she wondered what it was between herself and rain: two weddings and a baby. Twice a bride, now a widow with a baby.

When the Dutchman had sailed, leaving her on a stony peninsula off the Cape of Good Hope, she had never thought to make a home here. The Dutchman and the Pearl had left, one for the worlds beyond and the other for the nearest undefended port, and the Empress had arrived in their place. The crew, justifiably skeptical when she had first announced her captaincy, had found enough faith in her after their victory against the Company to give her a trial run. She had rewarded their confidence by leading them to mop up the scattered Company fleet, taking silks, specie, firearms, pottery, shoes, opium… The Empress’ men had money in their pockets. Two months of raiding earned her a reputation as a shrewd, aggressive hunter who took care of her crew, with an eye for strategic innovation born either of genius or rank ignorance, and the rumors leaned toward genius, luckily for her.

Ports were dangerous. Most pirates, especially those who had fought at the Maelstrom, had a measure of pride in her, as a mascot if nothing else. A minority, however, took exception to the very notion of a pirate King. The Court was adjourned, likely forever, but Elizabeth had become a sort of white stag among the more savage Brethren. She would sit facing a door at all times. Once, a man shot at her, clipping her ribs and left arm, and shattering a bottle she was sharing with another captain. She had spun, wild-eyed, and drawn and cocked her own pistol, only to see the offender gurgle and choke on his own blood as one of her crew slit his throat. Another time, as she took off her coat on returning to her cabin, she discovered a small steel wire with paper fletching embedded in the fabric, its tip and shaft coated in something sticky. She had checked herself nervously for punctures, but found none.

Being with child put an end to all that folly.

She had left the Empress in the deep of night, leaving not a word, taking an overstuffed sea chest and the maidservant she had bought at a captives’ market, and booked passage on a civilian ship, back to the cliffs. 

At the cliffs, there was nothing to do but wait. 

Elizabeth stared down through the rain, watching rivulets purl step by step down ledges of basalt toward the sea, feeling her coarse night-dress pull and cling at her shoulders, as her back and her legs and her lungs and belly ached fit for death. The cold numbed as it soaked down her spine.

Not half a year ago a pirate king, now a widow waiting on a cliff, and she couldn’t even give her son a name of his own. 

Paul was a good name. So was Samuel. Henry. Perhaps her crew would have named him for her, some ridiculous piraticism in Chinese that would overwhelm any Christian name, and he would be “Flying Fish” or “Powder Crow.” 

No going back to that now. No “Hello, Tai Huang; you look well. I’ve returned for my ship.”

And her son would grow up with the wall of the sea on the West and the stony highlands to the East, in a small hut with an illiterate orphan and a mother who did nothing but pine and watch for the sunset. 

A small callused hand touched her shoulder and she spun and flinched, one hand raised to…to strike, scratch, stab. She didn’t know.

It was Pei, her fine copper brow lined with worry, lips drawn in irritation. “Mistress, you are foolish,” she snapped, grabbing Elizabeth by the elbow and pulling her back down the path. “You will catch cold. And your baby is hungry—your breasts will hurt. Stop this foolishness and come.”

Elizabeth nodded and allowed Pei to lead her back down to the house, set her by the fire, and drape her in a blanket. She had not noticed she was shivering. 

Once Elizabeth was situated, Pei pressed the baby, wrapped tight in a clean shawl, into her arms. Elizabeth looked down at his little round face and nursed him awkwardly. He does not look like a Henry, she thought. Paul is such a common name, and I knew the most abominable simpering little fop named Samuel in Port Royal. “You would not be called the same name as your father and his father before him, would you?” she murmured.

The baby sucked, broke his little mouth off, and made a sort of chirping squeal, his watery brown eyes widening, before ducking his face back to nuzzle her chest.

“Or perhaps you would,” she said with a sigh. She was terribly cold and drenched, she realized, but the fire and the blanket were doing their work, and she shifted her arms under little William and rocked him, humming a wistful tune she had heard once in a tavern with her crew. 

Behind her, Pei allowed herself a pleased smile and began to dampen flour for dough.

 

Barbossa had marched up to Elizabeth’s house when William was two, bearing a sack of silver, an exquisite Mughal rifle embellished with scenes of tiger hunts in silver plate, and a smarmy grin. He had dropped her off at the cliffs in the first place, which made him the second of four captains she had expected might find her.

He had sat down to their meager dinner of beans and potatoes, uninvited, flanked by two of the Pearl’s crew whom he did not allow to eat, and proceeded to coax Elizabeth to recount every venture of her two-month stint as the Empress’ captain. When she was reticent, he would lead with the most fearsome and complimentary rumor. When she talked, he would smile and widen his eyes and nod and show his crooked teeth, and interject with “modesty does not become ye, miss,” or “aye, t’was a fine bit of sail-craft there.” Eventually he remarked, off-hand, that the Orang Laut of the East Indies would commonly make their homes at sea, whelps and all, and sometimes with a little pet dog or pig, too. 

“Where’s Jack?” she interrupted, bouncing William on her knee as he tried to upset her dish of boiled potato. 

The Captain’s jaundiced blue eyes tipped upwards and he sighed heavily, as though begging the heavens why he was constantly surrounded by sentimental fools. Then they narrowed and crinkled at the corners, half grandfather, half fox. “Languishing ashore, is Jack Sparrow,” he drawled. “Least he was, last we saw of him. Now if he were a wise man, which ye and I know otherwise, he’d find himself another ship. Like the Biscay Arrow. Smart little pink, she be: just docked at Cape Town, no crew to speak of, and word was, the captain be far too ready with the cat for the men’s likin’.” He gave a saintly frown for his bodyguards’ benefit, as Elizabeth pursed her lips in disapproval. 

“Thank-you, Captain, you have been most kind,” she said, rising from her seat deliberately and handing William to Pei. “But the light will be gone, and Pei and I have wool to spin.” She arched an eyebrow and stuck out her elbow for an escort. “If I might show you to your ship?”

“Of course, Mrs. Turner,” said Barbossa with a chuckle and a possibly genuine leer. She bit her tongue, but refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cringe as she linked elbows with him, jockeyed a bit for the upper hand, and finally managed to tuck his claw protectively into her waist.

A look at his smirk assured her that he had allowed her to win.

She took that slight victory for all it was worth and led him out the door and down the rocky path down the hill to the edge of the cliff, where he and his two crew took their leave: she had no idea where he had come from, or where he had anchored the Pearl. 

“Until another day, my liege,” he said, bowing to kiss her knuckles with a flourish of his hands.

“Fair winds and following seas,” she returned, tugging her fingers free and resisting the urge to wipe them on her skirt.

“Likewise,” Barbossa replied, and stood there, examining her, watching for something. Perhaps some impatience, some eagerness, some gratitude: Elizabeth was puzzled. After the silence stretched too long, she nodded to him and spun abruptly back up the path, reassured to hear footsteps retreating behind her.

A thought struck her and she turned around, eyes narrowed. “Barbossa,” she shouted. 

He spun slightly too fast, the cut ostrich feather flagging in the sea wind. 

“I,” she announced, drawing herself up and scowling down her nose, “do not languish.”

With that, she left her ambiguous associate and returned to the hut.

 

Most years, sometimes twice, sometimes not at all, Captain Barbossa would appear on her doorstep with a bag of coin and a princely souvenir, ready to sit down for whatever their meal happened to be and tell her the latest rumors of the Eastern seas: chaos, fat Dutch merchantmen stuffed to the gunwales with spices, piracy fallen to the small-time Malays. He would mention, as though off-hand, some smart frigate or brig at port nearby with a short or ill-treated crew, and would flatter her until she would spare a story or two of her own over the table. 

Why Barbossa seemed to think it profitable for him that she return to piracy, Elizabeth could hardly imagine. She had no intent to repay his favors.

With flattery of her own, she would often manage to extract a nugget about his exploits, but he would never allow the talk to wander toward Jack Sparrow, and after his fourth visit, she noticed with satisfaction, he would not mention the ship that had brought him by name.

She took to hanging about the port in breeches and a cap, portioning Barbossa’s irregular pension into books, a milk goat, ammunition for the rifle, broadcloth, and an adze to cut new timber for their home, among other goods that the sale of spun yarn could not pay for. Naval officers on their shore day would meet a clean-shaven, delicate young man at the tavern entrance, who would buy them a drink in exchange for a lesson with the saber. Midshipmen would find themselves tugged by the sleeve into an alley and offered a month’s wages for a protocol book, or a copy of Ovid, or Moore’s Navigator. 

Young William learned to read the Naval Gazette before the Bible, and puzzled over them both. He carded the wool that made up their everyday livelihood, helped Pei with the cooking and gardening, scratched his curly head with Elizabeth as they worked navigational problems, fenced with a stick, and tended the goat. 

Holding his interest was a constant chore. 

After an initial fire for making lines with a quill, he had balked at learning his letters once he mastered A through H. Only after starting him on reading—egg, bad, ceded, fed, dab, dead—did he bother to learn the rest of the alphabet. He had a horror of sums and long division, and was helpless without his paper multiplication table, but by eight he understood navigational principles well enough to figure latitude, so long as he was spared the actual work of calculations. Twice he lost interest in the sword altogether, until Elizabeth stopped favoring him and humiliated him repeatedly.

When he was four, learning to garden, he had asked Elizabeth and Pei question after question, in a linguistic salad of English and Cantonese: why were they carrying manure? Why did they dig? What were the pea seeds for? 

Elizabeth, with an occasional correction from Pei, explained that the pea seeds would go in the ground and eat the manure and drink the rain, and at the end of the summer they would grow up big and strong, just like the goat’s twin kids and like William himself. William was fascinated by the peas, and spent a whole morning staring at the young shoots, reverently passing his hand just over the fragile leaves, marveling at how different they were from the native flora. 

Another morning, Elizabeth dragged him away from a boulder on the cliff to sit him down in the hut for their French lesson. “But Mamma, but Mamma, I have a question,” he protested. “I have a question! Mamma!”

“What is it, William?” she asked, kneeling to look him in the eye, but keeping her grip on his arm. 

“What does moss eat?”

Elizabeth blinked. “Beg pardon…moths? What do moths eat?”

“No, Mamma, moss,” he corrected with an impatient huff. “What does moss eat?”

“Moss,” she repeated. “Moss is a plant, William.”

“So what does it eat if it hasn’t any dirt?” William stamped his bare feet on the rocky ground and shook his arms. “What does it eat?”

Elizabeth sat back on her heels, and thought of flecks of moss spreading over boulders, and the thin crust of lichen on all the sun-warmed rocks. “I…” She shook her head apologetically. “I don’t know. Dew, perhaps.”

Then they disappeared into the house, and discovered after half an hour that William had grown monstrously bored with French, and preferred instead to help Pei dress a game bird for dinner. Elizabeth shook her head to herself as she watched him probe at the giblets with his nimble little fingers. He was so little like Will sometimes. Flighty and obstinate.

A few weeks after William’s seventh birthday, she watched with chagrin as Captain Barbossa swaggered up the path, trailed by a strange crewman bearing a cylindrical cloth-covered parcel. 

“A trinket,” he announced, under William’s wide and awestruck stare, “from Venice.”

The crewman gave the package a little shake, rattling something inside, and Barbossa, perhaps missing Elizabeth’s and William’s usual gasps of admiration—Elizabeth’s forced, William’s genuine—turned around to see that the bundle was still shrouded in sailcloth. He growled at the man, who jumped, nearly fumbled the package, and managed to slip the string, drop the canvas, and reveal the best birthday present William ever got: a two-gallon glass jar of colored marbles.

William, grinning, saluted the Captain with an imaginary sword, seized the heavy jar, and spilled all the marbles in the sun before the threshold as Barbossa bowed to Elizabeth and disappeared into the house to take luncheon and talk about ships. He seemed to have given up hope of securing her as an ally before the ten years were up, but she may have—accidentally—hinted or intimated that she might not be opposed to eventually sailing in convoy under a more experienced captain’s banner. He seemed to think the prospect worth his while—or at least, thought it prudent that the Captain of the Flying Dutchman owe him a favor.

As they talked, William examined the ribbons and blooms of color in the marbles, squinted at them in the sunlight, found a heavy rock, and carefully cracked them into bits. The threads of colored glass made more sense when viewed from the inside.

The next day, after Elizabeth had recovered from her customary post-Barbossa drinking bout, when she would sing the pirate song, throw her Chinese hat at the door-post, kick the bed-frame that sheltered the locked Chest, and weep softly with a blanket pulled over her head to keep her son from seeing, she headed out to catch the goat and stumbled over the big glass jar planted mouth down in the dirt. “William,” she groaned, righting it and carrying it back inside to where Pei had already begun the day’s spinning and her son was stirring their breakfast of potatoes.

“Mother,” William scolded, his shoulders slumping in irritation. “You moved it.”

“It was on the ground,” she replied impatiently. “Where are your marbles? You haven’t lost them already?”

William pointed to a freshly dug hollow in their earthen floor, brimming with color. “I had the jar where I wanted it,” he said. “Now I have to start over.”

He took the jar from her hands, left the potatoes simmering, and carefully settled it over a shoot of some young plant by the window, patting earth around its mouth to make a seal.  
Elizabeth watched, bemused. “Mark it with a pole so no one trips over it,” she said at last, as he stood and brushed the dirt off his hands.

“Yes, Mother.”

The jar stayed planted in the ground for a month, as William marked the shoot’s growth with notches on a stick. Elizabeth asked him about it once, but William happened to be in one of his grown-up, private moods, and airily asked if they could get another jar. 

 

Elizabeth never watched when Pei would butcher the goats.

Every rutting season, a wandering buck would tup their milk doe for a day before flitting off to impregnate the port’s other goats and browse on the hillsides, while she aimlessly circled on her tether, nipping the close-bitten grass. Come spring, the household gained two wobbling kids. When the kids were old enough to wean, Pei would strap a cloth around the doe’s udder and force them to find their own forage, leaving the doe to bleat after them as they wandered, and morning and evening Pei would take a bucket and milk a pint to curdle beside the fire.

Pei would stroke the kids when they approached, talk to them, and feed them tidbits of bread and apple. Butchering day would begin like any other day, when Pei would lure them to a scrawny tree and call sweetly, waving a handful of mash, but now with a long slender carving knife tucked into her belt.

She would greet them with the sweets, letting their soft muzzles prod and nibble at her skirts as their bobtails wagged and their ears twitched, then swiftly slip a lead over each slender neck, tying them to the tree. Then, still cooing, still with the sweet mash on her fingers, she would straddle a kid, draw the knife, and sweep her slim arm across and high into the air, flinging bright blood and spattering the ground before her as the kid shuddered and flailed, throat split so deep Elizabeth would find the track of the knife on the bones as she scraped the neck for soup.

The other kid would scream like a child—so much like a child—and toss and buck against the strangling lead until the small tree waved its arms like a woman dancing, until Pei wrestled it to the ground and brought the bloody knife to bear.

Elizabeth never watched after the first time, except the day she trudged home laden with wool and stories from the port, to spot Pei under the tree, two carcasses dangling at shoulder height by their hocks, and William at her elbow, studiously watching the hide peel away under her blade.

Horrified, she dropped the bale and sprinted over the stony scrub for her son, the tree fading into a sinister blur as her eyes stung. 

One kid was already dressed, the head and hooves set aside for soup, the hide slung like a towel over a branch, the entrails portioned and hanging beside—great stomach, true stomach, intestines—the liver and kidneys in a pot nearby, bowels discarded to the dust. The other was skinned and the belly cut, the offal and organs cascading to a churning pile on a cloth beneath it. As Elizabeth ran, Pei slit into the hot red hollow behind its ribs and drew out the pluck with her small bloody fist. Lungs leaned open like pink wings, the long white pipe of the throat snapped wetly up out of the cavity, the small red heart at the center of all of it sluggishly squeezed. 

William took the heart with interest and held it to the light, watching the tireless muscle tug and tug beneath the slick clear sack that shielded it, probing at the vessels that sprouted like tree roots from its peak, until they disappeared into the lungs. His face closed down, his brown eyes widened in awe, and behind him, Pei coolly scraped the sweetbreads from the depths of the ribs.

“William, don’t touch it!” Elizabeth shrieked, barreling up to them like a fury a-wing and nearly skewering herself on Pei’s knife as she skidded to a stop. “Put it down, put it away, William!” She seized his arm and shook the kid’s pluck to the dust, all the while fixing Pei with a furious snarl. 

William squealed in consternation, and Elizabeth swept him up to her shoulder like a child half his size and staggered away as quickly as her feet would take them, gasping and shuddering against him as he stiffened and began to sniff. 

He was bawling by the time they fell into the shelter of the house, and she retreated to her bed and muffled her face with a pillow, shuddering. William put a tentative hand, still sticky with blood and fluid, on her shoulder, and as she wrestled to shove down her sobs, she heard him whispering, over and over in his small choked voice, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mum! I won’t touch it! I won’t!”

“Oh, William,” she moaned, dropping the pillow. 

He wailed and latched his arms around her waist. “I’m sorry!”

“Oh, my sweet William. No.” She stroked his back, willing her breath to steady as he shuddered in fear and remorse.

It was nearly an hour before they were both calm. Pei, as though she had been listening at the door, entered with the two livers in one large bowl and the stomachs and intestines in another. “Will you and the child scrape casings this evening?” she asked, coolly depositing the bowls beside the hearth.

Elizabeth stiffened. “No,” she snapped. “Take that mess outside before the reek brings blowflies. Get the wool from the path. Salt the meat. Go.”

Pei nodded, infuriatingly impervious to abuse, and disappeared, taking the bowl of entrails with her.

“William,” said Elizabeth, softening, “it’s time to tell you what happened to your father.”

William rubbed his red face and sat as tall and solemn as he could as Elizabeth told the tale he had never heard before, the one that came between the skeletons and the Pearl, and the Indiamen and the Empress. The tale that explained Elizabeth’s horror of hearts, but not her horror of Pei’s luring the kids to the tree on butchering day.

At the end of it all, he counted on his fingers and demonstrated his skills of subtraction. “Four years ‘till Father comes?” he asked, all earnesty.

“Three, darling. Only three.”

He frowned and twisted his fingers. “Will Father come home like the Captain?”

Elizabeth blinked, and recalled Captain Barbossa’s brief, taunting visits. “No, William. Home to stay.”

She fixed her eyes at the sea-facing wall of their windowless home, gritting her teeth and straightening, as she whispered to the sea winds, “And we will have no less.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is in the same universe as "Sea Dreams" and "Age of the Uzi," so it has a happy ending where everybody from the movies lives.
> 
> Regarding Pei: I'm sure Elizabeth values her company as well as her labor, and Pei does seem to be the only one with an ounce of common sense, but Pei is a slave, or an informally indentured servant, tops. I see Elizabeth as a genuinely bad person, a callous, entitled person, who makes mistakes, takes risks, and hurts people. It's part of what makes her a great character.
> 
> William is supposed to grow up into this off-beat deceptively-irreverent mad-scientist/necromancer dude and finagle a way to get his dad out of the Dutchman's Curse. The story where that happened was too epic to be born, and Age of the Uzi William III, who has a creepy mansion on an island off the coast of Wales, a collection of possessed tribal masks, and a re-animated skeleton dog, was deleted in the Tragic Hard-Drive Reformatting Accident of 2009.


End file.
